Brockhouse pushes for recording of closed-door meetings

District 6 council person Greg Brockhouse answers questions after the City council goes behind closed doors to debate the issue of the possible RNC 2020 convention in San Antonio on May 3, 2018.

District 6 council person Greg Brockhouse answers questions after...

Let’s move on from the now-moot question of whether San Antonio should have submitted a bid for the 2020 Republican National Convention. That debate is so two-weeks-ago.

Let’s also temporarily put aside the important issue of whether Mayor Ron Nirenberg and the City Council violated either the spirit or the letter of the Texas Open Meetings Act by deciding against a convention bid behind closed doors. (The Express-News has filed a formal complaint with the Texas Attorney General’s Office over this issue.)

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As the RNC bid debate slowly recedes into our collective rearview mirror, new questions have emerged: Was there a recording of that executive session? And, if not, what did the city do to document what happened?

The Open Meetings Act requires that all closed-door meetings by governmental bodies (with the exception of legal consultations from an attorney) be documented either with an audio recording or a certified agenda.

For more than 20 years, the San Antonio City Council has opted for the certified agenda option, with meeting notes taken by the city clerk.

Councilman Greg Brockhouse, Nirenberg’s bestest buddy (but only on International Sarcasm Day), has a big problem with that. On Tuesday, Brockhouse sent an email to his colleagues, calling for the audio recording of future executive sessions.

In a Wednesday press release, Brockhouse said, “Based on my efforts to ensure complete and total transparency, recording all Closed Door Executive Sessions will provide for a detailed record of events. In my view it will also ensure a total compliance by all Members in the Closed Session.”

Brockhouse said he became more convinced of the need for audio recording after viewing certified agendas for two executive sessions held by the council during Brockhouse’s first year in office: the May 3 meeting on the RNC bid and a January 25 session which resulted in City Manager Sheryl Sculley receiving a $75,000 bonus.

In both cases, Brockhouse disagreed with the decisions and objected to the fact that they were made away from the public eye. He said the certified agendas for both of those meetings, which he asked to see on Tuesday, “are a joke. One sentence.”

Brockhouse added, “Any interested party that wants to sue to find out what’s going on behind closed doors, there’s no record of it. There’s nothing. It’s a black hole.”

Brockhouse argues that the city is violating the Open Meetings Act, which defines a certified agenda as a “true and correct record of the proceedings.” The law also stipulates that certified agendas include a “statement of the subject matter of each deliberation” and a “record of any future action taken.”

This definition begs the following question: How much written information is required to provide a “true and correct record”?

That question vexed Jim Mattox 30 years ago when, as Texas attorney general, he faced an inquiry from the executive director of the Commission on Jail Standards.

In a 1988 opinion (JM-840), Mattox concluded that a certified agenda “need not be a verbatim transcript” of an executive session, but must be “more than a one or two word list of the subjects discussed.”

That leaves plenty of interpretive wiggle room.

The main purpose of documenting closed-door meetings is to offer legal proof that the governmental body didn’t overstep the requirements of the Open Meetings Act. Neither recordings nor certified agendas of executive sessions are available through open-records requests. A member of the public can only see them by court order, in the case of a lawsuit.

The underlying issue is that Brockhouse believes the council has been using executive sessions to make policy decisions, which should be reserved for open meetings. He pointed to both the Sculley bonus and the RNC discussion as examples of the council trying to get around transparency requirements by reaching “consensus” without technically taking a vote.